Science Versus Fiction: SETI’s Seth Shostak on Battleship

An alien ships rises from the sea in Battleship.Photo: ILM/Universal Pictures

Within the first five minutes of Battleship, we learn that contact has been made with Planet G, a rocky planet that actually exists in the constellation Libra.

In real life, scientists have labeled the planet in the Gliese 581 system a “Goldilocks zone,” meaning that its Earth-like properties could potentially support life. True to Hollywood form, notorious extraterrestrials from Planet G — resembling Halo‘s Master Chief more than Alien’‘s xenomorphs — are hell-bent on destroying our blue planet.

Seth Shostak of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence says the grain of scientific truth in Hasbro’s $200 million popcorn blockbuster might be enough to generate real interest in astronomy.

“People don’t learn science in movies,” said Shostak, who served as a scientific consultant on the PG-13 Battleship, which opens Friday in the United States. “You don’t go to the movies thinking, ‘I hope I learn some quantum mechanics this afternoon.’ But on the other hand, movies are instrumental and influential in getting young people interested in science.”

Shostak is no stranger to the intersection of science and Hollywood. He’s consulted on a number of productions — from Contact to Species II to the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still — in part due to The Science & Entertainment Exchange, a private institution dating back to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed a charter by Congress to provide scientific advice to the United States.

The SETI senior astronomer was once one of those young people drawn to science by sci-fi movies and creature features. “When I was a kid, which was just after Edison invented moving pictures,” he joked in a phone interview with Wired, “there were films that involved aliens coming to Earth for bad purposes.” He cites the original The War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still as being what Battleship could be for kids (and some adults) today.

Shostak’s background — he studied astronomy and researched galaxies at the California Institute of Technology, and harbored a love of cheesy science fiction films — made SETI a perfect fit when he started working for the agency in 1990. “I already knew a lot about the techniques,” he said.

Science Versus Fiction in Battleship

SETI and The Beacon Project: SETI uses radio astronomy to listen for transmissions from space. In Battleship, The Beacon Project is a satellite communication device that started sending waves — it’s not explained what kind, but they look like awesome lasers — toward the Gliese 581 system in 2005 in a search for extraterrestrial life.

Fast-forward to today, and alien spaceships are descending from the sky above Earth, confirming what Stephen Hawking warned us all about — a hostile alien race making contact. In this case, that contact involves gargantuan explosions and high-tech weaponry. Perhaps most importantly, it includes a self-aware chainsaw on wheels that eats its way through anything in its path.

Alien reaction times: The movie describes a “slingshot effect” that hurls the transmission toward the Gliese 581 solar system at a very high speed, but the time frame from when the aliens receive our transmission to when they invade is highly unlikely. Spaceships traveling at the speed of light would take 20 years to get to Earth because the planet is 118 trillion miles away.

Still, we should probably cut Battleship some slack: One of the most beloved aliens of all time made an even bigger intergalactic-travel faux pas, according to Shostak.

“E.T. was far-fetched.”

“E.T. was far-fetched,” Shostak said. “E.T. was this wimpy-looking kid that came to Earth to pick some plants, but he came from the Andromeda Galaxy to do that.” The Andromeda Galaxy is well over 2 million light-years away, which gives Battleship a one-up on silly believability.

Searching for Goldilocks: SETI will make more of an effort to target specific Goldilocks planets within the next couple of years, mirroring The Beacon Project in certain ways.

“When I started, we assumed stars had planets, but we didn’t know,” Shostak said. “In fact, our current SETI program is directed at star systems that are known to have planets thanks to the NASA Kepler telescope.”

Governmental responses: During Shostak’s days at SETI, he’s experienced some false alarms when it comes to aliens, but the organization has come up with a protocol for dealing with the situation (he chairs a committee charged with redrafting the “appropriate” response).

“You check out the signal first to make sure it’s for real,” he said, “and then you notify the astronomical community, of course, because you want other people to check it out for you. And then you notify the public and the media and the government.”

Unlike the movie, you surely don’t send out a signal until you consult the United Nations. And contrary to conspiracy theory, Shostak says the government probably won’t do anything at first. “No Men in Black show up,” he said. “It’s the media that starts to call you right away.”

What aliens want: Sci-fi books and movies have outlined dozens of reasons why aliens would come to Earth, but Shostak said the most obvious examples are stupid. Searching for water? “It doesn’t make sense, because hydrogen is the most commonplace element in the universe,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of hydrogen and a lot of oxygen in the universe, which means there’s going to be a lot of H2O.”

What about aliens probing humans to create hybrids? “If you want to believe that, look, 80 percent of a pumpkin’s DNA is identical to human DNA,” he said. “And yet, I don’t worry too much about pumpkin DNA getting inside me except around Thanksgiving when I eat it as a pie.”

So, why would an alien race make contact with humans? After all, if an alien civilization is advanced enough to travel throughout the cosmos, it wouldn’t be after us for our knowledge of physics and astronomy. “That’s like Chris Columbus sailing to America because he wants to learn about building wooden ships,” Shostak said.

For him, it’s simple: The only reason extraterrestrials would want to come to Earth would be to check out our unique cultures. But again, why us? Wouldn’t we be too primitive to be of any interest?

“That’s speculation on alien sociology,” Shostak said. “Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the Beagle and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman.”